It was Alfred North Whitehead, I believe, who is credited with saying that the history of philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Plato. So, too, anyone assigned to declaim on the subject of “The Conservative Movement Since 1950” is essentially compelled to offer a gloss on George Nash’s famous and important book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. And this makes my position ridiculous, since George is here, not to mention Bill Rusher, who made his own important contribution to our self-understanding with his book The Rise of the Right. So I am in the frame of mind that James Stockdale expressed in that woeful moment of the 1992 vice presidential debate: Why am I here? The positions are clearly reversed: George or Bill should be giving this keynote, and I should be sitting in wait as a respondent, for I am their apprentice.

Perhaps it might be said that the time has come for a representative of the next generation of interpreters or advocates of the conservative cause to step forward and take the reins. Perhaps this is sensible. Perhaps--nay hopefully--it will start a productive argument.

Click here to read the full text of this speech as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

Steven F. Hayward is the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at AEI.